[Gamers' Day 2007] Time Keeps On Slippin' Slippin' Slippin'
The future of first-person shooters? We're not quite sure yet, but TimeShift sure is interesting.
Published: May 17, 2007
A few weeks ago, we noticed that the fancy new trailer for Sabre Interactive upcoming TimeShift FPS had the PS3 logo at the tail end. At the time, though, the game (published by Vivendi Games' Sierra wing) was only confirmed for the 360 and PC, which made sense given how many projects seem to go both ways. We sort of pushed the logo out of our minds, assuming there would be some kind of announcement come E3 or something. As it turns out, Vivendi apparently has a funny way of announcing their PS3 projects: they show a working build running at Sony's annual Gamers' Day event. Neat.
The genesis for the game is the same as on the PC where it was originally being bandied about as a sort of steampunk-themed shooter with time distortion effects like stopping, slowing and reversing time. A while back, though, almost when the game was finished, it was decided that the game needed to be completely rebooted. Gone now are the steampunk elements (which bums us out a bit as there are no steampunk games out there anymore), replaced instead by a more familiar -- some might complain generic -- tale of an alternate timeline, a despotic ruler and a man wielding the time-shifting cyber suit called the S.A.M. (Yeah, we know, great name.)
Though we only got to sit in on the presentation of the game mid-level, we took away the same basic impression that we originally had when we saw the content: this game is using tech like crazy. There's something about seeing the raindrops that were previously falling quite realistically slow or just plum stop completely, mainly because most gamers probably still have it in their head that most rain is just a simple couple sheets of flat, 2D textures rather than something that has real properties -- if not flat-out physics than at least it will pull back up out of the ground when time is reversed or hang in the air, distorting the image seen through them.
Though the game at its core is meant to be a fairly straight shooter with toys (thanks to Havok's new version 4.5 update, the physics in the game give the player plenty to play around with), the time manipulation does open up the idea of a light sort of sandbox. Yeah, sure you can choose to take on enemies using cover like a normal shooter, or you can just freeze time, walk up and jack someone's gun from right out of their hands turning it on them and their buddies. Since you have an unlimited number of uses for your time powers (though obviously they'll drain the suit's dark matter tanks, which slowly refill over time), the fun is in playing around with situations to take what could be really messed up odds and turning them around with just a couple of carefully planned moves.
The game right now is early, but it will be running at 1080p and if they can give the game the same sort of polish and smoothness that we saw in the PC build, this could easily be one of the cooler titles on the PS3. Like a few of the games being shown off at the event, we couldn't actually play (though this was more a matter of time constraints than anything else), but hopefully that will change come E3.
The genesis for the game is the same as on the PC where it was originally being bandied about as a sort of steampunk-themed shooter with time distortion effects like stopping, slowing and reversing time. A while back, though, almost when the game was finished, it was decided that the game needed to be completely rebooted. Gone now are the steampunk elements (which bums us out a bit as there are no steampunk games out there anymore), replaced instead by a more familiar -- some might complain generic -- tale of an alternate timeline, a despotic ruler and a man wielding the time-shifting cyber suit called the S.A.M. (Yeah, we know, great name.)
Though we only got to sit in on the presentation of the game mid-level, we took away the same basic impression that we originally had when we saw the content: this game is using tech like crazy. There's something about seeing the raindrops that were previously falling quite realistically slow or just plum stop completely, mainly because most gamers probably still have it in their head that most rain is just a simple couple sheets of flat, 2D textures rather than something that has real properties -- if not flat-out physics than at least it will pull back up out of the ground when time is reversed or hang in the air, distorting the image seen through them.
Though the game at its core is meant to be a fairly straight shooter with toys (thanks to Havok's new version 4.5 update, the physics in the game give the player plenty to play around with), the time manipulation does open up the idea of a light sort of sandbox. Yeah, sure you can choose to take on enemies using cover like a normal shooter, or you can just freeze time, walk up and jack someone's gun from right out of their hands turning it on them and their buddies. Since you have an unlimited number of uses for your time powers (though obviously they'll drain the suit's dark matter tanks, which slowly refill over time), the fun is in playing around with situations to take what could be really messed up odds and turning them around with just a couple of carefully planned moves.
The game right now is early, but it will be running at 1080p and if they can give the game the same sort of polish and smoothness that we saw in the PC build, this could easily be one of the cooler titles on the PS3. Like a few of the games being shown off at the event, we couldn't actually play (though this was more a matter of time constraints than anything else), but hopefully that will change come E3.